By Andrew Peterson
Three children in an occupied town, where lizard soldiers take children away at night in a black carriage, turn out to be the lost heirs of a drowned kingdom.
Janner Igiby is twelve and spends most of his time keeping his brother Tink and his little sister Leeli out of trouble, which is a full-time job in a town run by the Fangs of Dang. The Fangs are lizard men. They serve Gnag the Nameless, they have occupied Skree for nine years, they smell terrible, and once a year the Black Carriage rolls through Glipwood at night and a child is gone by morning. The Igibys have their mother Nia, their grandfather Podo, who used to be a pirate and lost a leg to a sea dragon and would cheerfully take on the whole Fang army with a stick, and Leeli's dog Nugget. What they do not have is any idea why the Fangs suddenly want them specifically. The answer is buried in a story everyone thinks is a fairy tale: the lost Jewels of Anniera. Andrew Peterson keeps interrupting himself with footnotes about the local wildlife, the toothy cows that will eat a person, the horned hounds, the sea dragons, and the footnotes are half the fun.
For a Narnia family this is the closest thing on the shelf in feel: a made-up world with its own maps and monsters and jokes, a family of children who turn out to matter enormously, and a moral spine that is never in doubt. What makes it work at the table rather than just on the page is the comedy. Peterson is a songwriter and it shows in the rhythm of his sentences, and he undercuts his own grandeur constantly with a silly footnote, which means a child can take the scary parts because a joke is never more than a page away. Janner is also the exact right hero for an oldest child, because his whole burden is that he is responsible for his siblings and nobody asked him if he wanted to be. There are four books and the whole thing was planned as one story, so it pays off.